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Inventory # PCRE-00015-0068

ALC CGP G7 OSA RCA
1873 - 1932
Canadian

View from Odaray Bench, Looking North
oil on board
dated Sept. 10, 1929 and on verso signed, titled, dated, inscribed "Varnish" and variously and estate stamp embossed with the estate blindstamp
8 5/8 x 10 3/8 in, 21.9 x 26.4 cm

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Toronto
Canadian Art, Joyner Waddington's, November 28, 2006, lot 52
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, 1904, page 297
J.E.H. MacDonald, “Notes for Paper on Relation of Poetry to Painting with Special Reference to Canadian Painting,” October 20, 1929, MacDonald fonds, R3259-0-5-E, item 103624, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
Lisa Christensen, The Lake O’Hara Art of J.E.H. MacDonald and Hiker’s Guide, 2003, pages 35 and 118


The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown...

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1, lines 12 – 15

Roughly one month after J.E.H. MacDonald painted this vibrant interpretation of the Rocky Mountains, he alluded to these lines of William Shakespeare in a lecture at Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club. The famed club, still located at 14 Elm Street just off Yonge Street, was where in 1911, Lawren Harris first sought an introduction with MacDonald, hastening the formation of the Group of Seven. In MacDonald’s October 1929 lecture, titled “Poetry and Painting,” the manuscript of which is housed at Library and Archives Canada, MacDonald states clearly the metaphysical foundations of his approach: “A picture is not the reflection of a thing seen, but a compound of feelings aroused in the artist by the thing seen resulting, according to his power, in a more concentrated expression than the natural objects can give.”

MacDonald’s aims were transcendental, founded in the idea that it is not the subject itself that is most important, so much as the experience that subject creates. Here, what MacDonald sought most to communicate was his own poetic encounter with majesty: the resonances he felt, and his experience of the sublime. What both aided and tested MacDonald in his goal was his working process. His oil sketches, painted en plein air, were subject to changing circumstances. Shifting light effects and weather conditions dictated that he work briskly and nimbly as he sought to capture the mutable qualities of a moment. However, these constraints could lend a work a sense of immediacy and, in fortunate circumstances, poetic inspiration.

MacDonald had traveled to the Rockies annually since 1924, and this trip in August and September of 1929 was his penultimate journey to this region. The artist’s base was the Lake O’Hara Lodge and its surrounding cabins, and his paintings of their rustic interiors hang in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Thomson Collection in the Art Gallery of Ontario. At this time, the main lodge was only accessible by horseback, and once there, MacDonald would hike to his preferred locales, sketch box in hand. The artist was known for his self-contained, even delicate nature, but this was not apparent during these sojourns, as he ably negotiated the often rough and uneven terrain, energized by the surrounding magnificence.

The Odaray Bench, a vantage point used by MacDonald on this and other trips, is located southwest of Schaffer Lake along the McArthur Pass Trail, and it provides an impressive vista to the north. The artist renders that view here in gestural textures and a nuanced palette, resulting in a particularly richly painted example of the scene. All the elements, from the foreground rocks to the distant clouds, are fully engaged with, and the mountain forms are accentuated by a deep, dusky violet that depicts their shadows. The romantic sky with rose-tinted clouds contains subtle vertical brushwork upward from the peaks that suggests an emanating aurora of light. The aforementioned poetic inspiration possible with on-site painting seems to have found the artist on this particular occasion.

The most eloquent and apt praise for MacDonald’s painted poetry comes from his friend and fellow Group member Arthur Lismer: “He sang in tune with the voice of nature, in ecstatic rhythms of form and colour. His expressive use of the eloquent language of line, tone, and colour symbolizes, as in music, the futility of words.”

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